At 13:05 the tone of voice on, "I wasn't studying this because I was interested in building a career" made me so happy. That is the spirit of science. Go to 12:40 for more context.
This is one of the most brilliant and informative lectures that I have had the pleasure to witness. The speaker is an exceptionally gifted communicator. Thank you!!!
his binding of feelings and emotions into the mix is something i would agree with. Ive been studying my own consciousness and ability to recall situations ive been in good and bad. I HAVE found that my memories are bound more to a feeling, or more of how i remember feeling when i last interacted with that person or situation. so i guess what im saying is ive found that im naturally storing emotions and feelings as a sort of way of stacking the little details of the situation into a compact feeling or emotion. and if i need to recall the details i can recall the feeling and emotions and it links me to the reasons i felt that way which are connected to the details of what happened in that interaction.
‘The dogs are the chicken’ Brilliantly laughable! lol I have a seizure condition and have been very interested in brain activity since, as I often noticed deja vu and floating feelings in body, many occasions of which were precursors to having a seizure. I also an quite interested in dream activists well since I have felt a dreamlike stage during my absence of reality. It has been a pleasure to struggle to learn as much as I can understand about my condition and my curiosity to cross these uploads on RUclips. Much respect to the Royal Institute for sharing, and even more so given to Mr. Mark Solms. Thank you infinitely! Peace and love 💕
@@vhawk1951kl Oh, I misinterpreted you above. You are suggesting that the information and the evidence, provided by Dr Solm is somehow devoid of .....what? Consciouness? He DEFINED consciousness at the beginning, middle and end of his talk, did he not? Are you mouthing empty words without understanding the basis of his presentation. It seems to me that certain people from an echo chamber find themselves on science sites wanting to argue about consciousness when really they want to fight over "gee, this world is one without any kind of spirituality" when this is plain nonsense & a straw man argument at the very least. Of course I could be entirely wrong about this. If I am, then I apologise. But it was your manner. Your specific response.
@@vhawk1951kl No such thing as a correct definition of consciousness if you're not willing to consider all important ideas. If you dislike this video because you haven't learned anything from it then that's your problem.
@@larmaytv36 Does that not depend entirely on your criteria for "correct"? - "correct" according to who? If you are the arbiter of "correct" correct" in what sense do you use the word*correct*- the mathematical sense? "There is no*correct*definition of consciousness" - you say: ecce the hazards of universals, which the uncharitable might characterise as simply sloppy thinking. Clearly your famous and - for you, indefinable "consciousness" is to be found in a very forest of universals and sloppy thinking- To say nothing of pouring from the empty into the void. There is absolutely no difficulty whatsoever with defining "consciousness" for anyone with any wits and learning. Whoever made that sweeping generalisation and other forms of universal, clearly lacks both. If whoever makes an assertion cannot define what he means by "consciousness" or at least set out clearly what he seeks means or intends to convey by a particular word had best not use it at all- On any view it is no more than drivel
That kinda follows by definition. Entropy is the thing that works to make everything exactly like everything else (hence the whole "heat death of the Universe" thing which has nothing to do with death and everything to do with the Universe becoming completely homogeneous where nothing interesting can happen anymore), while homeostasis literally meaning "staying the same" (this specific thing, locally, that is unlike other stuff around it). It kinda goes without saying these two work against each other - entropy CAN be resisted, in a strictly local context, by an appropriate system, which is why fridges can exist; and that's just what homeostasis does.
The "Living state' is a state described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and it requires Gibbs free energy input for homeostasis. This is not unique to living complexity, but is characteristic of all hierarchically organized complex systems. They tend to disintegrate into their more basic sub-units, without energy input for maintenance (homeostasis is maintaining this desired maintenance state in living systems).
This is the only thing I've seen which actually advanced my understanding of consciousness - thanks! Most talks either propose a solution which misses the point of the hard problem, or discuss the hard problem without advancing a solution.
I think the answer may be that consciousness itself is a feeling. Also I think that the ability to discern different types of feelings gives rise to the feeling of consciousness. The point though is that there is only one small part of the brain that turns out the lights completely.
@@iAnasazi I can understand what the term "subconscious thought" refers to, but I can't imagine what an unconscious feeling would be. If you aren't conscious of a feeling, how could you say you were feeling it at all?
@@nommopilot That's just language games. Feelings can be defined purely functionally, as in "the most plausible explanation for behaviour x is (involving) feeling y". On the other hand, you could equate "feeling" with "consciousness" a priori, which still explains nothing.
The hypothesis that feelings are evolutionary adaptations in order to maintain homeostasis is brilliant! I have often thought to myself, what if I had no feelings; if I could only observe my surroundings, like a security camera, with no sensations of touch, taste, smell, hearing or emotion. Would I be conscious? What would differentiate "me" from a simple camera or a computer? If one feels nothing, and has no unique sensations or emotions, and no "individual qualities" to self-reference, would that STILL allow one to experience consciousness? A fascinating lecture...
Mmmm. Interesting. I think if one "feels nothing" then the hypothesis would be that you would not, in fact, be able to experience consciousness. This is because the positioning of this consciousness or "the feel" (as the article by Solm demonstrated) is part of the cortical area of the brain but also occurs because of a working brain stem. Without the brain stem there is no "experience." You mentioned "no unique sensations" -but that must include 'seeing'. To observe is also 'seeing' and thus unique to you. The other issue that the brain, not being like a computer, but organic, can develop into a 'thinking' or seeing creation, which means that there is a possibility of you experiencing feelings even if you could not linguistically describe these. If you were simply an engineering device, like a camera, you would not. But fascinating!! YT is a great place for learning. I'm a post grad in music (not science). I had to explain to students that data and empirical evidence was still essential. It was not always a prescriptive idea of feelings or 'interpretations.'
A non conscious thing cannot become conscious as an evolutionary adaptation. How does something that has no feelings develop feelings? At a point you'll have to accept that we are designed by a creator!
Right yes, The first thing I stated in my response was that without feelings, without consciousness, you cannot experience further feelings. At no point did Solm state you can have a non-conscious being which then develops an affect. You need to have this within certain elements of your brain (I'm keeping this simple) already. Specific patients, when examined have been shown to have a clear affect with a description of their surroundings etc. So it's an essence of the emotion that we should be aware of it. The attribute of the possibility of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions and affects are concerned. The other issue is that at no point does evolution in humanity mean that we can't have been created by a god figure. The Judeo- Christian Islamic tradition supports evolution in human growth. Believing in a god does not cancel the function of consciousness or the explanation of our existence thru aspects of adaptation. This is not contingent on there not being a creator. I find GREAT sustenance within science to help explain our ability to adapt. If we believe in this, we may identify as creatures of a creator who work within NATURAL law. Which is how god, when you interpret scriptures, works himself. We are never asked by god to ACCEPT the idea of a creator, or worse, be forced to. Which your comment hints at. But we are asked to have faith. To accept is wrong in its entirety. No-one should 'accept' anything unless it is an observable fact. Or as a small child, we are told, by parents: "accept that this is a rule: you will eat dinner at 6pm" But we are not children (don't then tell me that god expects us to be nothing but children.....I suspect that's the next item on your list! :) ). Still, this a great platform of discussion on brain development, where the statement appeared that an unconscious being CANNOT itself develop an affect. You can't put anything in an empty vessel that lacks brain 'elements' (simply stated), Chukwuma Keep watching. It's an excellent discussion.
I’m touched by your brilliance, your wit, and the prospect of a theory of consciousness that puts raw emotion “downtown” in theories of consciousness - where I feel it belongs. :) I also appreciate your candidness, sharing the story of your brother’s injury in the context of your life as a person and as a scientist. You’re truly amazing. Thank you for this lecture, and for your work in the field. It’s inspiring!
Thank you Mark Solms . To make an analogy of the connection between function and feeling I would say that the function of my car engine is to bring me in my car to visit the seaside and experience the sea birds and the surf on my face .So my point is that while studying the workings of the engine of my car that will get me there I will never get to understand or feel the experience of my seaside trip .
When you were speaking about how a physiological event changed your brother, I was reminded on how frightening losing the ability to speak is. I know its nothing like what your brother, and family went through, but, during a migraine I was awakened to the realisation that you are very much separate from everything else. When you lose the ability to take words which you know full well, inside your head, and the migraine or bleed or whatever, changes your ability to communicate, it wakes you up to the fact that we are, very much, insular beings who can become trapped inside our own heads. Luckily its a transient phenomena for myself but nowadays I have a very real fear of anything like this happening again. I also disagree that behind the injury we are not ourselves, how do you know? I felt very much like myself but to the world I appeared very different...its nightmarish!
Vedanta is the very science of consciousness at both human and cosmic levels. It recognises consciousness as the ultimate reality and affirms its presence in all existence. All this- whatever exists in this changing universe, is pervaded by consciousness" --Isa Upanishad .5000-BCE The ancient Vedic rishis in all their wisdom said as early as 8000 BC , that our universe is not woven from matter but consciousness . (They never patent there knowledge there own name ) There are connections between quantum mechanics & consciousness . Consciousness is the intelligence, the organising principle behind the arising of form. The quantum field or pure consciousness is influenced by intention and desire. All atoms in the entire universe are capable of mind reading and communicating with other atoms. There is a consciousness in every molecule of matter. As per quantum physics things do not exist in its physical form, unless they are observed by a conscious observer. In every experiment when an observer expected energy to behave as a particle, it did so. When he thought it would probably be wave-like, it was. And when observers believed it might start out as one form and end up as another, it did so. This means ,nothing actually exists in its physical form until observed by someone, was adopted by the group as one of the concepts. You created them by your expectations and your thoughts of what should be. In every situation in your life, including the wealth or lack of it you choose to attract to you. Biology is a quantum process. All the processes in the body including cell communications are triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appear at the quantum level. On the subatomic level-mind is over matter. The brain and DNA is governed by the laws of quantum physics rather than the laws of biology or neuro physiology. THE COSMOS IS THE PLAYGROUND OF MAYA.. FROM MICROCOSM TO MACROCOSM.. Bhagavad Gita is all about BEING IN THE MOMENT. You cannot change your past, you cannot survive without water, you cannot change natures principle. The only solution is to accept things as they are. Life is a combination or physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects. Without spiritual development , man is without love or positive emotions ( affection, care, respect, sympathy ) . Karma is the result of your actions. If you do something good, you will get good tings in return and if you do bad things, you will get likewise in return. Karma or the actions that you do in the present life is passed on to the next life. But fate is not passed on to the next life. Dharma is when we are walking the path of our soul's purpose. When we are walking our path we are out of karma. We are no longer creating cause and effect. We are in flow with the universe, with our spirit. Our soul is line with the Divine. 'Manu-Smiriti'- 5000BC describes the code for leading a disciplined way of life. Patience, Pardon, Suppression of will, Stay away from Theft, Purity, Control of desires, Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth, Controlling Anger. These 10 qualities are considered as main characteristics of the Dharma. The whole of material creation is conscious. Our consciousness creates our reality. What our consciousness can conceive , it can also create. Human beings are conscious. They can see themselves in the mirror and see colours, while an animal cannot. To a Vedantic every part of this universe is dynamic, it is vibrating, it is listening and can respond according to ones KARMA, It can be by action and can be purely thought. The universe listens to our action as well as thought and gives in return what exactly we want either knowingly or unknowingly, weather it is bad or good. Science is trying to understand the universe ‘out there’ and Vedanta addressed the universe ‘inside you’” Schrödinger, in speaking of a universe in which particles are represented by wave functions, said, “The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.” The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West. There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction… The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. - Erwin Schrödinger " You do not have a soul , you are a soul and you have a body "
@@facttruth7571 i feel like if you watch Dr. Solms and come away less convinced rather than more in the primacy and importance of subjective interpretation of the world/the things within it then you've very much missed the point
I was just browsing through and I stumbled on this I just want to say you’re simply amazing just because even someone like me you explain it so easy and everyone can understand your a legendary hero man
28:28 I've been watching science-related videos for over 10 years on this platform, but never had I been referred to as a scientist by a scientist on RUclips's spacetime continuum. Thank you for such an experience.
Really *Whose* " science of *What*? Owing to the loss of the capacity to ponder and reflect, whenever the contemporary average man hears or employs in conversation any word(perhaps " science, or " consciousness") with which he is familiar only by its consonance, he does not pause to think, nor does there even arise in him any question as to what exactly is meant by this word, he having already decided, once and for all, both that he knows it and that others know it too. Do you see that you simply*assume* that you know what you mean by either "science" , or " consciousness" and it never even crosses you mind to seek to discover exactly what passes in you associations or associative apparatus or mind, or thoughts(so- called). Is that not*Exactly* correct? Not only is it and must it be correct, for the very simply reason that you*cannot*. How exactly would you go about doing that and is it not the exact equivalent of a mirror seeking to reflect itself, or you stand on your own shoulders? Can you understand that?
Uh, will, let me unfreeze you. Simple. An awareness of being alive, a sense of being instead of nonbeing, that you exist occupying time and space, that you have volume, weight, and height. Happy?
It is a complicated matter and it is not easy to distill all the complexities of the problem in a 1 hour lecture. At least I bothered to read his book. I am sure you did not.
Brilliant, in the US sense! Theoretical physicist and mathematician by trade, but I've always had intense interest in philosophy and philosophy of everything. BUT, especially to the problem of "me" and physic processes. I'm buying the book as I type. Thanks for awakening me to this unique approach existing.
The way I see it. Feelings evolved to help us survive in groups. You are happy, you are safe. Your body can relax. You are sad, because something bad happened that might change the outlook on your future survival. Feelings that are basic emotions that are easy for other group members to see.
@@pmcguinness3041 Interesting. I wonder what defines a decision when presented with multiple options. Do you follow a group laughing or do you help the group crying? I guess empathy is a survival emotion too?
@@pmcguinness3041 God made us conscious and breathed "life" and information into our DNA, THAT .is called intelligent design. human kind will never create life
@@bknyland4134 thats too lazy thing to label everything out of mind as god. The universe is complex beyond the human mind at least for present time but this will not be the case forever.
@@DillaCat THE GOD of the Bible. The Father, The Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit. No one "made" them. God exists outside of time, space and matter. Our Human brains cannot even conceive how this is possible.
I believe, like Dr. Solms states, that the source of emotions and thus foundational consciousness does reside in the (primitive) brainstem. The reticular activating systems (RAS) also, by the way, regulates some foundational aspects of attention. We need the RAS, for example, to filter the voices from the background noise at a cocktail party. So this brainstem does have a very fundamental role in our mental functions. It makes sense also from an evolutionary perspective. But the insight of homeostasis as the mechanism (the pendulum) of maintaining order and fighting entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) is absolutely brilliant. Life cannot exist with uncontrolled entropy. Life by definition is natures ability to create self-regulating systems that maintain homeostasis, the balance needed for all metabolic organisms to exist. And self-replication adds the ability of these systems to evolve under different environments. It is logical that evolution would bring about adaptive strategies to maintain a stable homeostatic state in a given environment. And as self-replicating populations adapt to new environments through mutations, evolution ensures the adaptability of lifeforms. And with the emergence of animal life, after the Cambrian explosion 540 million years ago, the animal kingdom would develop nervous systems capable regulating behavior (emotions are our evolutionary regulation of behavior) based on the homeostatic state of the individual and the predictive ability to secure this healthy, necessary state. This is all brilliant!! The neocortex (the pallium) also added a very large extension to our cognitive capabilities. This clearly also extended our capabilities of self-awareness. An awareness of self in a given environment and our ability to also change that environment in order to secure our homeostasis. This extended self-awareness is what makes us human. We are aware of our ability to modify our environment and also to feel empathy for other beings (other persons or agents). This the next level of awareness, our social awareness. We are aware of what others are aware of and even worried about what others are not aware of. This is evolutions next level. So I would also infer, that is also the next level of consciousness.
@@rubiks6 "Is this not the place we should be looking if we're trying to find out what the functional mechanism of consciousness is?" (40:50-ish) This is obviously a great and essential question, but we're not there yet. Neuroscientists don't even agree on where to look for this mechanism at present, but the evidence elucidated in this video at least strongly suggests a definite answer to the where: the brain stem.
Such an excellent talk 👏🏻 This is the first time I’ve heard a well reasoned and explained justification for why consciousness is beneficial for survival, and therefore why it would have evolved at all.
Sorry, but the quality of experiences are not brain-based (including the brain stem) for the simple reason that consciousness did not emerge from brain matter. Consciousness is the ontological primary.
@@michaelseale7268 Modern science needs to point to a mechanical cause of a sense of Being or consciousness. They discount research in psychedelics , even though many prominent researchers have used them, because their careers are based in 'hard' physical reductionist thought. Finding truth in the Universe is up to the individual, not academia.
What a powerful thesis on Brain Stem Spring, Sensing, Micro-Sensing, Sensibility, The Involuntariness of Sensibility, Micro-Consciousness, The Core of Feeling, Why Emotions Are Critical, How Malcognition Has Us To Willingly Go Unevolutipn & More.
I would have given this talk in reverse. The content was amazing but the later parts were more crucial for the main idea and the most key point here was the one given last. Maybe it's just me who wants to know the agenda first and the details later
@@sanchos9084 I think you understood well enough! I actually agree with your "NOT the thought itself" - I think in essence it contains all the other stuff. I mean one has to be conscious to even respond !
@@colinpatterson728 I’ve been meditating for a year and it was transformative. I think we should understand that language is limited when it comes to describing subjective experiences and conciseness can be experienced only from subjective experience. I think we shouldn’t be surprised if woo woo stuff mystics talk about come to be true.
I use 3D Markovian decision geometry for expressing other things in our species common social issues. These mathematical structures seem to be everywhere. My brain literally had the feeling of popping with ecstacy when this lecture turned on some lights. Thanks, I needed that.
As a Schelerian, I completely agree that feelings are a pre-requisite for consciousness. And if I understand correctly, he's saying the function of feelings demonstrates that they must already be conscious because feelings direct actions and choices (toward what is pleasurable and away from what is painful). I think, though, it would be helpful for him to distinguish the two forms of "consciousness" he's speaking of - In other words, when he says feelings are a pre-requisite for "consciousness," I think he means the higher consciousness that is characterized by self-awareness and language. When he says "Feelings are always conscious," though, I think he means a lower form of consciousness that is pre-lingual. Some philosophers argue that this second type of consciousness is common to all organic life. For example, the roots of a tree will grow will often toward what is nurturing and away from what is harmful. Some philosophers argue that this is the same sort of "consciousness" that he's ascribing to feelings.
I am so happy, all this supports my own theory of consciousness. Feeling.... hunger, thirst, pain, all this is conscious, only in this way can we keep our bodies alive. And in my opinion, all living things will have this ability. Without this ability life would be impossible
I like this guy after only 3 mins. One sentence succeeds in explaining that which I've tried to for many years. We ARE our emotional response to our environment. The individual can be manipulated by manipulation of the environment in which they experience themselves.
I tend to view things in terms of evolution, perhaps too much, but useful here for these questions and observations: (1) consciousness is shared by many organisms, so one should expect that the source of consciousness rests in the structures of the brain that all conscious organisms share; (2) one should at least suspect, if not expect, that organisms that share structures of the brain would share the traits associated with them, suggesting that lower organisms experience feelings-including emotions-greater than many people acknowledge; (3) just as affection for offspring and mate provide an evolutionary advantage (defined as getting genes into the next generation), feelings provide an evolutionary advantage in keeping the organism alive longer, thus able to reproduce more.
I am extatic to hear this. Finally we can understand animals are somebody not something and we can stop treating them as objects to be exploited. I had this intuition spontaneously in 2013 and I went vegan. Hope all who listen think of animals and their hellish suffering in factory farms and slaughterhouses.
I'm going to disappoint you a little, I think it's great that you've become a vegetarian, the problem is that plants have feelings too. And everything that's alive
I liked his talk, especially that he is following the evidence wherever it leads. I feel that this is not what most people mean by "the hard problem." Solms is trying to answer "why is there an inner experience" in an adaptive evolutionary model. He seems to be saying that feelings must be felt in order to do the function of increasing survival, so this is why we feel, because feeling must be felt to have any effect. This is his "why." Like I said, at least he is following the evidence, but he isn't asking "how is there an inner experience" or "what is consciousness" or any question that I might think of when you say "the hard problem of consciousness."
i still don't follow the logic of why feeling has to be involved. in his example about air hunger in a burning building, it seems to me that very low-level animals would act the same way. the survival mechanism there to escape the danger can happen without any conscious agency on behalf of the organism. why do I need self-awareness and inner experience to flee a burning building?
@@fvhaudsilhvdfs I understand why this answer isn't particularly satisfying, but like I said, he is a scientist in a particular community where some other scientists insist that consciousness is either something like the smoke coming from an engine or an illusion. He is trying to build a case for consciousness being an actual integral part of an evolved organism, so he has to show that it is helpful in survival. I agree with him that emotions are mostly instinctual algorithms that lead to increased fitness, and his point is that feelings must be felt, so there has to be an experiencer, and it has to be conscious. While I agree with that one part, I think his fellow scientists are kind of misguided and silly for discounting consciousness so casually, but that is just my opinion, and I'm not trying to get tenure or be published.
Since childhood, maybe from the age of about 7 or 8, I have questioned myself. " Why am I looking at the world from behind my eyes (a white Englishman in the 20th/21st century) and not for instance a poor Indian woman either now or at any time in history. I still constantly have those thoughts. To me that is the fundamental question of conciousness.
@@captainoates7236 I think many people have asked such questions throughout the ages since consciousness doesn't seem to be anchored in time or space. I don't know the answer any more than any scientist or guru does, but this is my current view. I've come to regard consciousness as "what it feels like for matter to be alive", so every living cell has basic awareness, and the brain provides the perception, memory and emotions to the living matter of my brain. In this view, my consciousness is anchored to this particular configuration of matter until its inevitable dissolution. I don't know how any of this would work or if it makes any sense, but it works for me. I am always open to other ideas since no one has the ultimate answer, and probably never will.
I guess I am asking a different kind of question, even quasi religious, but maybe another definition of conciousness is the ability to conceive of such things and reflect on the world we inhabit.
A brilliant exposition. But can we not go further? Note that Dr. Solms says that when the reticular formation is STIMULATED the subject may feel depression or some other feeling. The point I'm making is that the feeling is generated by some external source--I.e., in this case, the probes in the brain. That is, it is not the brain stem/reticular formation which generates the feeling but, rather, that the brain stem/reticular formation RECEIVES a stimulus. This reinforces in me the hypothesis that consciousness is a fundamental field (just as the electron field or proton field are fundamental) which the brain stem/reticular formation accesses or receives. That is, the brain stem/reticular formation does NOT generate consciousness but receives it perhaps in some way analogous to how a radio receives an electromagnetic signal.
Very interesting talk. The parts about reactions without cortex make me think more of "awareness" than "feeling". Maybe consciousness has levels of awareness. Awareness of the senses, then awareness of desires and then awareness of thoughts. Dreams for example, have no awareness of the senses, but have awareness of desires and we can experience feelings (fear, infatuation, arousal). Dreams usually lack will power. We don't usually decide what we do when we dream but we wouldn't say our dreamed persona lacks consciousness inside the dream as it acts and reacts within the dream very much like a conscious person. Same with the people we dream of. They are entirely made up, but for us, they look pretty humanly complete in the context of the dream.
I have some willpower in my dreams though 🤔... Some times I just ride along, but some times I find myself making willful decisions... At other times, I find myself in a spectator position (it's like I can sense myself and position, but I'm independent of what that self does... it's like being in a VR game without me doing the movement)
@@joszsz Yeah dreams can be lucid sometimes. I sometimes listen my voice narrating what will happen next in the dream I'm having. I've the suspicion Marvin Minsky was onto something when he wrote (in Society of Mind) about brain functions being composed of many simpler subsystems that can be turned on and off. What is also very impressive is how much we can still do with most of our brain gone. It'd seem like staying alive, sensing and reacting to the world can be done just with our "reptilian" part of the brain (I think it's the basal ganglia)
@@DamianReloaded Yeah! I do the narration thing too, and it's at that point that I usually realise it's a dream and wake up. It's all so intriguing. I'm not familiar with Marvin though, so I'll have to check his work out
Of course, it will be the last mistery we humans will solve some day, if we ever manage to solve it at all. I think its because we ultimately are the thing we study, ao we are maybe not possible to understand this fully. But his work is for sure a big step in the right direction. I'm sick of the scientists who say something nonsensical like "consciousness is only an imagination and does not really exist", which is absolutely wrong and simply makes no sense! Consciousness is the only thing we can say 100% that it exists. Everything else, the world around us and all the scientific knowledge those scientists are so proud of, could theoretically be a simulation and not exist. So completely put on the Kof. This shows that there are successful scientists who understand the simplest things completely wrong and are easily led by their success on a wrong path. I cant understand how someone could deny that consciousness exists. It makes no sense at all!
@@JonesP77 Yes. Consciousness - subjective experience - is the only real thing we know. Yet "subjectively" is a kind of derogatory term. It's one of the reasons I'm into psychology more than the conventional sciences, to be honest.
@@JonesP77 It took a few tricks of the mind to do so, but I have discovered what human consciousness is. The word consciousness is misleading. Here we he is speakiing of responding to events which indeed exists in all animals and is in the primitive brain, the stem and its RAS. What we speak of as humans being conscious is another neural proces. I am writing it up now.
"So that sentence: 'Neuropsychology is admirable, but it excludes the psyche' captured exactly my dismay and frustration with my field. Such was how things stood in the 1980's." Mark Solms
You said something along the lines of "Why are we conscious and why doesn't all of this go on in the dark?" There cannot be a non-experience for something that collects information and thinks towards a projected future, which can help the organism prepare for winter, etc. That's an adaptation that helps the spieces survive. It has been fine tuned by natural selection, and we call this conscious experience.
@@thegreath.sapiensapien6907 Don't know about making us conscious, but going back into deep time, I imagine cooking food and keeping warm at nights, had a heck of a lot to do with being able to grow this super-sized brain we inhabit.
I have learned, when I was in college in one of my classes that when the brain is “short changed” in a part, or parts of its anatomy either by surgery or by lack of the part in birth, another part, or parts, of the brain “steps up” to fulfill the job of the missing part as much as it can. Until such time as we understand more about how the brain works and where various functions occur and how and where the neurotransmitters go, we can learn where control initiates, but as far as inferring “backup parts” that can take over temporarily, or permanently in the event of failure or absence, we can never Fully Understand the workings of the neurons in the brain.
By this argument you run into the partial ship building problem, essentially contending you become a fundamentally different person separate from your former self anytime one of your neurons die.
That's really interesting! Especially to me, as it turns out my brainstem was pushed slowly but steadily for at least 15 or 20 years (I'm 43 now) by a giant (by the official classification at 51x43x33mm) vestibular schwannoma. That's a benign (is most cases) slow growing tumor growing out of the Schwann cells, in my case of the vestibular-acoustic nerve. Schwann cells are like the insulation around the nerve very much like the insulation on cables. The thing is the tumor as it has grown so big, has gradually pushed my brainstem way to the left side (it has started on the right side nerve). The brainstem, which normally should be going straight down in the middle from the base of the brain to spinal cord in my case has been pushed way left, so that's making about a 90 degrees turn to go around the tumor, almost from the top end of the brainstem, to the bottom of the cerebellum, where the brainstem returns to its normal position. That's actually the main reason to believe it has been growing very slowly, as it has managed to make such deformation without noticeable effects. Actually one of the few effects I got from it (which I didn't know at the time) were only about 3 months before I went to get a scan and found about the tumor, and it was for about a week in the summer in which I got overwhelming urge to yawn or swallow without a reason. And about a week later it was gone, I was back to some kind of normal (which apparently hasn't been normal for me for many years already). In any case that brainstem reticular formation that Mark Solms mentions as the source of our Consciousness, in my case was extremely deformed. Most likely not directly damaged, but at least pressed and pushed to the side. Also I assume there has been some manipulation in the region during the surgery I got to remove the tumor. Apparently the surgery was good (even if quite long - 14 hours) as I don't experience any noticeable physical effects from all this. There are other things like a moderate hydrocephalus, which was initially caused by the tumor completely compressing flat the 4th ventricle, and thus disturbing the normal reabsorption cycle of the cerebrospinal fluid. And also the scan that found the tumor, showed that I has a cyst of water on the outer right-side surface of the right-hemisphere, which doctors are saying is probably condition which I had from a baby. As result it pushed against my right hemisphere, and it got slightly underdeveloped as size at least. It's difficult to measure deficits in the functions of the right-brain hemisphere I guess. Sorry for the long description, but to summarize I wonder if that extreme deformation of my brainstem has affected my consciousness somehow?
@@She_Nanigans I guess that's why the tumor grew for many years before it started to manifest as side-effects (initially with balance and hearing degradation in affected ear)
For someone with such a strange condition , your text proves that consciousness, intellect and language have not been at all hindered. Best of Health to you going forward!
We are not a machine and the mind goes ways beyond the brain. There is stacks of evidence on this. Thank you for sharing and I hope you will continue your research 'outside' of the body. I fill the issue with your brother, is a 'confusion' between the two brain hemispheres.
Thank you very very much Mark this is absolutely fascinating. I would like to repeat as Patrick says below -RI please please stop putting time limits. I seek these subjects and are prepared to listen and think. This is not the kind of facebook click sensation 2 millisecond attention span stuff which seems to be becoming the norm - I was able to get a fairly good grasp of this really complex subject after listening 3 times to the lecture and having invested well over 50 hours exploring other sources on this subject this is by far the best.
Do you see or recognise or understand, that when you use words such as "consciousness", you simply *assume* that you know what you mean by them or seek to convey when you use them? Owing to the loss of the capacity to ponder and reflect, whenever the contemporary average man hears or employs in conversation any word with which he is familiar only by its consonance, he does not pause to think, nor does there even arise in him any question as to what exactly is meant by this word, he having already decided, once and for all, both that he knows it and that others know it too. Is it not exactly correct that he has no idea and never even pauses to question or seek to discover exactly what passes in his associations or their relevant apparatus when he hears or uses that word? Why not? Because he *cannot*, because he is doing the psychological equivalent of trying to stand on his own shoulders or a mirror seeking to reflect itself. Is that not *exactly* true?
Consciousness arises from a mind that is split. Once split, the mind becomes a perceived rather than a knower. For this, the body was made (You must perceive something and WITH something). Purification of perception through right thinking is how we return to a whole mind and to knowing.
The ideas around 54 minute mark remind me a lot of Terrence Deacon's ideas. I think this is the path forward. Very good presentation, I wish you good luck!
@@TheWorldTeacher - Oh no they're not. They are absolute. God decides what is good and bad. The Creator of the universe and of Man decides what is right and what is wrong and His determinations are unmovable.
The moment a particle is a wave; it has to be a conscious wave! Nicola Tesla states, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration” Gravity is the conscious attraction among waves to create the illusion of particles, and creates our experience-able Universe. Max Planck states: "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from Consciousness". Life is the Infinite Consciousness, experiencing the Infinite Possibilities, Infinitely. We are "It", experiencing our infinite possibilities in our finite moment. Our job is to make it interesting!
Dear Dr. Solms, thank you for your researches, always so concrete and stimulating. Now you move the seat of consciousness from the cortex to the brain stem. But don't you think this was already Jaak Panksepp's line? Unfortunately this does not solve the “hard” problem, but simply displaces it.
Even if the brain stem is the seat of consciousness, why do feelings need to actually be felt for organisms to act in response to negative stimuli? If feelings are caused by neural activity, why don't organisms simply act in response to this neural activity instead of going through the middleman of conscious perception? For instance, instead of lack of food -> neural activity corresponding with hunger -> feeling of hunger -> action to end hunger, why isn't the causal chain simply lack of food -> neural activity corresponding to hunger -> action to end hunger? If consciousness plays an important role in the survival of conscious organisms, then consciousness must NOT be epiphenomenal, i.e. it must exert a causal influence on organisms' physical behavior. In order to justify the position that consciousness exerts this sort of "top-down" influence, one must explain the mechanism(s) by which this occurs. Maybe Dr. Solms was getting to this at the end, but I would have liked to see him delve into this seemingly glaring hole in his theory.
There is so much that physicalism can't properly explain no matter how hard scientists try. I wish I could tell RUclips to stop suggesting this guy. I've heard him and found him wanting.
Brilliant talk!. Loved the way you elucidated and teased out this problem. The problem of consciousness is something I have thought about for a very long time (I'm 65 now) without anyone in my life really wanting to engage with me about it. I will be getting your book (I'm in the UK). Thank you very much
@@LuigiSimoncini Hi there. Thanks for your reply. Yes I have seen some talks of his online. Very interesting. As far as I understand him ( and others such as Sam Smith?) he makes the case for a materialist, neurological basis for the experience of being conscious. However to me it still seems unexplained how our subjective conscious experience generates out of billions of organic neurons firing in response to sensory input signals. Such an interesting topic. The more I look the deeper the rabbit hole seems to get.
Thank you very much, Dr Solms, I enjoyed your lecture. Removal of Cortext, Consciousness continues. Removal of Brain, Consciousness continues, How about removal of Brain Stem ? There has been cases of NDE (NearDeath Experiences) where the brain is considered clinicaly dead, but the Consciouseness continues until the person was revived. Just a point of argument, not to disrupt your wonderful lecture.
This was absolutely brilliant. It makes a lot of sense. Raw emotions in the brainstorm. I'll be thinking about this for a long time. I cannot help but now think of the "factor 5" model of personality. This would seem to tie in very nicely.
This is such an insightful lecture and explains so much of the importance of emotions in our lives as well as our individual and collective survival / prosperity. These emotional and awareness connections to the brain stem region would be mostly new to the majority of viewers, in my humble opinion (?) Thanks so much !
AP. If the children with hydranencephaly (who do not have a cerebral cortex) are feeling and reacting as you describe, what stimuli is this in response to? They cannot hear if they do not have an auditory cortex, cannot see without a visual cortex and cannot detect touch without a parietal cortex. They cannot have voluntary movement without a motor cortex. The responses of the children seem to not be purely reflexes, but to be in response to environment. Is there, for example, some reprogramming of the brainstem to detect stimuli, etc?
The necessary means to consciousness is introspection. One awakens through self-observation and observation of life. The flower blooms because of its root.
@@dkathrens77 Hi Dennis. Some people may want to intellectualize. Wrong idea. Simply gain insight from your life experiences through introspection (meditation, looking inward, self-observation.) It's that simple.
BIG thank you Mark Solms - so very interesting. And so very important for future of humankind - e.g.; using the knowledge as at least one intrinsic aspect in developments of the best we can do in AI - including ethics, etc.
I am thinking the same! Although I'm not a neuroscientist, I know biology very well and enough of how computers work. Sometimes I ponder through that same question too, like how does a brain work. Once a time I wrote down what I think how I think and it kinda starts to become jumbled first. But when I continue to write (although for some reason I feel a pain in my head when I do that), it kinda always went to a central system that decides what to do, what's bad or good. Then if I connect that system to the theory of evolution, the conclusion that I get is the system that decides what to do must have been selected to maintain its body to be alive, that's homeostasis!
Here's a question I often wonder about: Suppose we had total control of the mind. Would we be able to synthesize completely new emotions and feelings, or would they all fall into existing categories? If we dashed to an alien planet, would the aliens experience the same feelings as we do? Is the space of feeling unbounded, or does everything fall into happy/sad/excited/pain/anger/etc. Is there a "froopy" feeling that we just cannot begin to understand but Xorax the Squid-like Alien feels every day?
Not sure. A dog can smell 400 times more than we can. We can do the maths and understand the engineering in the olfactory system but we don’t have a clue what that range of ability would be like as an experience. Same with the blind woman who understood the mechanics of sight but had absolutely no notion of the sight experience. Maybe, with the aliens, if we needed to take on those extra senses from a purely survival point of view, we could do it.
Is mind just a sum total of collection of thoughts, emotions, feelings, instincts or is there something more to it? Are we conscious of ourselves and the world, because of the knowledge that we have collected from childhood or regardless of it? Is there anything else there inside, besides this collective identity we call mind?
Finally some solid progress on solving the Hard problem of consciousness. I've always held that consciousness was innately tied to feeling vs information processing but this research show that it is also localized in the brain stem. Mark also further proposes that consciousness imparts evolutionary advantages by means of providing another layer of feedback-control for regulation and survival. So what then is unique about the cells, structures and chemicals in this region that make it the seat of consciousness? What layer of the onion is ultimately conscious? Is it at the level of a network of cells and chemical signals; can an isolated cell 'feel'; is matter itself on some primordial level conscious? My hypothesis is that feeling IS a fundamental characteristic of physical reality. But how can we test a single cell or even a molecule for its capacity to feel? Where does reductionism end and we say that well, we need at least a network of 'x' cells communicating with 'y' chemicals to support consciousness? I posit that the particular cells, chemicals and structures found in the brain stem are unique only in the manner in which 'inherent consciousness' can express itself through complex networks. The physical world is inherently conscious. Will neuroscience reach a limit of what it can state which is linguistic, empirical or physical (as Quantum Mechanics has)? What a fascinating journey towards finding ourselves. The Buddha is smiling for a reason ... I feel. Great video and great explanation Mark!
Described like this, "feeling" seems to be just another algorithm that the brain runs in order to ensure survival. So this doesn't really solve the hard problem: why there is such thing as subjective experience? Why a philosophical zombie would not be just as fit as a "person"? How can we be sure that Mark Solms is not himself/itself a philosophical zombie?
I'm not sure it's possible to be a zombie. Any sufficiently complex system that understands the world will create an understanding of the other agents in the world and how they behave, given that situation why wouldn't the same system also then have an understanding of it's own agency in the world in the exact same manner. I think you could only have zombies if there was no consistent action free of any consistent motivation of action. I see consciousness as a feedback loop with a scale related to the complexity of brain containing it.
Perhaps our sleep dreams allow us to discover the explanations of the unconscious feelings, as long as the symbols in the dreams are properly interpreted. The human body must depend on homeostasis for proper functioning; all body organs rely on homeostasis, be it our mind, liver, heart, etc. A recurring dream is evidence that a message is in need of a proper explanation to correct an imbalance in the mind. Pain and suffering screams to us that all is not well, regardless of the organ(s) requiring attention. My experience is that for those seeking Consciousness, it can take a lifetime to resolve lack of mental homeostasis. Mark Solms makes good Sense to me; he gives evidence of our innate ability to resolve complicated issues.
Great talk. Still doesn't solve the hard problem though. Why is it that atoms arranged in a certain way to make a brain stem...how/why in the world does that create "feelings"?
Q1. Because that was the one design that survived out of all the other possible brain cell versions that was not removed from the gene pool over the course of human history. Your question is essentially what Darwin answered in his infamous treatise. Q2. Stay tuned! One day just like we figured out how our digestive system converts nutrition to energy and waste, we will know the answer to that too...
There are other podcasts that answer this question. As d1p70 says, it is a function of a partly random neural network that happens to work better in its environment than any other one that was selected by that environment to continue its better adapted existence. In its simplest manifestation it provided feedback to the organism that eventually, over millions of years, evolved into "sensations" and "feelings". In its simplest form, it was just a chemical reaction. The gradual development of better detection-reaction systems, aka known now as "neural networks" enabled these increasingly complex sensations to become "consciousness". Let us not forget that there is a very wide spectrum of "consciousness" . It is important to understand that this phenomena, including self-awareness and self-identification, is not confined to the human species. This tends to be under-appreciated because humans are the only species, so far, that have developed a system of verbal communication that can express it in a way that can be passed on to future generations. Apes that have been taught sign language can express their feelings to others, including other apes that understand sign language. Species without language are restricted to sharing and expressing feelings by things like body contact.
I like the idea that the brain is in a predictive processing state, constantly trying to guess what will happen next and prepare for it. Emotions, aka "feelings" are, in our holographic memory, relate to situations and events in the past. Ex: walking past a bakery you smell fresh bread. Your mouth waters. You notice you feel hungry. You find yourself altering course to walk into that bakery as your body prepares to consume and digest some bread. "You" thought it was "YOUR" IDEA. "You" only got the memo after the event. Free will? "You" may decide to eat something else, but no part of "you" will decide to NOT EAT--why? Because "you" won't survive long enough to pass on "your" genetic material.
Fascinating and illuminating, definitely going to buy the book! It leaves me wondering, does this imply that the origin of consciousness coincides with the origin of life? Because in order for life to exist there must be a preference for survival and in order to have preference there must be some feeling of positive or negative. Would this mean that even the simplest of organisms have some degree of consciousness?
Organisms with behaviour not conducive to their survival are wiped from the gene pool. The gene pool is everything that survived. I think we still need to figure out how a simple circuit within the brain stem can generate a conscious feeling. Why just there? What about the overall process of life within the biosphere, which also encompasses complex cycles, some of them self-perpetuating? Does it have feelings, as it stumbles along blindly responding to changes imposed by externalities such as sunlight? I doubt it. But if not, why not?
Maybe, maybe not. I find it interesting that AI researches who are thinking about making reward functions for future AIs can't make a reward function which isn't terrible. They constantly stumble into paradoxes and dead ends, which either don't exist when it comes to humans or they are much less of an issue with humans. Who knows, maybe consciousness is the best way of having reward functions for complex organisms and so the evolution chose consciousness organisms. Maybe AI research will have to make AIs of the future conscious if they want their AIs to have reward functions which work well. A guy from computerphile made a series of videos talking about problems with AIs and problems of reward function with AIs.
The problem with emotional feelings (feeling afraid), as opposed to physical homeostatic feelings (feeling hungry), is that the emotional ones are often the consequence and not the cause of decision making and behavior. Are you running because you are afraid or are you are afraid because you running? The latter is more possible as both the father of modern psychology, William James, remarked more than a century ago and neuroscience confirms today. This is even more so in survival and highly uncertain situations (escaping a fire). If evolution required from us to first consciously feel before we run from a fire, or a bear, we would all be dead by now! And this has significant implications for the ongoing discussions of free will. Nevertheless, a fascinating talk by a great scientist and thinker!
The reason material will always remain just a perception is because there will always be an explanatory gap problem due to our subjective or inner reality not being able to be observed by us as if it were some material object that has physical properties, so it is inconceivable how such a reality can be observed by studying the brain. It is the subjective self that is aware of the function of the senses being outlets that allow us to perceive the objective world. Our senses being material can only give us experience of material phenomena that has attributes of form, taste, smell, sound, and physical texture, but since consciousness being awareness is devoid of physical attributes our awareness which is the subjective self will always be inaccessible for our senses to perceive. And since consciousness cannot observe consciousness there will always be an explanatory gap problem as well as the hard problem of consciousness that will always make consciousness and it's origins not observable by any material means. Since truth can be defined as " that which is realized to be true " materialism can never be a realized truth but rather a belief or perception.
Maybe consciousness is something relatively very basic and the rest, more advanced characteristics which we notice in the real world as the end result are simply parts of a multilayered system, like modules that extend its capability.
I was already of the opinion that animals probably have some degree of consciousness, like us, but I feel that what Mark says in this talk supports that view point. When you say modules that extend its capability, that made me think of colour vision. Some animals can see a wider spectrum of colours than we do, some less.
Vedanta is the very science of consciousness at both human and cosmic levels. It recognises consciousness as the ultimate reality and affirms its presence in all existence. All this- whatever exists in this changing universe, is pervaded by consciousness" --Isa Upanishad .5000-BCE The ancient Vedic rishis in all their wisdom said as early as 8000 BC , that our universe is not woven from matter but consciousness . (They never patent there knowledge there own name ) There are connections between quantum mechanics & consciousness . Consciousness is the intelligence, the organising principle behind the arising of form. The quantum field or pure consciousness is influenced by intention and desire. All atoms in the entire universe are capable of mind reading and communicating with other atoms. There is a consciousness in every molecule of matter. As per quantum physics things do not exist in its physical form, unless they are observed by a conscious observer. In every experiment when an observer expected energy to behave as a particle, it did so. When he thought it would probably be wave-like, it was. And when observers believed it might start out as one form and end up as another, it did so. This means ,nothing actually exists in its physical form until observed by someone, was adopted by the group as one of the concepts. You created them by your expectations and your thoughts of what should be. In every situation in your life, including the wealth or lack of it you choose to attract to you. Biology is a quantum process. All the processes in the body including cell communications are triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appear at the quantum level. On the subatomic level-mind is over matter. The brain and DNA is governed by the laws of quantum physics rather than the laws of biology or neuro physiology. THE COSMOS IS THE PLAYGROUND OF MAYA.. FROM MICROCOSM TO MACROCOSM.. Bhagavad Gita is all about BEING IN THE MOMENT. You cannot change your past, you cannot survive without water, you cannot change natures principle. The only solution is to accept things as they are. Life is a combination or physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects. Without spiritual development , man is without love or positive emotions ( affection, care, respect, sympathy ) . Karma is the result of your actions. If you do something good, you will get good tings in return and if you do bad things, you will get likewise in return. Karma or the actions that you do in the present life is passed on to the next life. But fate is not passed on to the next life. Dharma is when we are walking the path of our soul's purpose. When we are walking our path we are out of karma. We are no longer creating cause and effect. We are in flow with the universe, with our spirit. Our soul is line with the Divine. 'Manu-Smiriti'- 5000BC describes the code for leading a disciplined way of life. Patience, Pardon, Suppression of will, Stay away from Theft, Purity, Control of desires, Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth, Controlling Anger. These 10 qualities are considered as main characteristics of the Dharma. The whole of material creation is conscious. Our consciousness creates our reality. What our consciousness can conceive , it can also create. Human beings are conscious. They can see themselves in the mirror and see colours, while an animal cannot. To a Vedantic every part of this universe is dynamic, it is vibrating, it is listening and can respond according to ones KARMA, It can be by action and can be purely thought. The universe listens to our action as well as thought and gives in return what exactly we want either knowingly or unknowingly, weather it is bad or good. Science is trying to understand the universe ‘out there’ and Vedanta addressed the universe ‘inside you’” Schrödinger, in speaking of a universe in which particles are represented by wave functions, said, “The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.” The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West. There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction… The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. - Erwin Schrödinger " You do not have a soul , you are a soul and you have a body "
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
This is the best value of time I have ever spent watching something.
At 13:05 the tone of voice on, "I wasn't studying this because I was interested in building a career" made me so happy. That is the spirit of science.
Go to 12:40 for more context.
@Geegee Poo It is now about controlling resources and treating scientists as disposable entities after obtaining their ip for commerce.
Really. Whose "science" of what?
@@vhawk1951kl Yeah, there are worrying comments on this channel.
science does not have spirit. they are lost littttle babies on earth who will never fugure it out until they know they are gods
@@vhawk1951kl all science. True scientists are driven by curiosity.
51:41 "If we understand the function of the feeling, then we understand the function of the consciousness"
Fascinating talk, Thank you very much.
This is one of the most brilliant and informative lectures that I have had the pleasure to witness. The speaker is an exceptionally gifted communicator. Thank you!!!
his binding of feelings and emotions into the mix is something i would agree with. Ive been studying my own consciousness and ability to recall situations ive been in good and bad. I HAVE found that my memories are bound more to a feeling, or more of how i remember feeling when i last interacted with that person or situation. so i guess what im saying is ive found that im naturally storing emotions and feelings as a sort of way of stacking the little details of the situation into a compact feeling or emotion. and if i need to recall the details i can recall the feeling and emotions and it links me to the reasons i felt that way which are connected to the details of what happened in that interaction.
Agree. Me too. Memory is somehow triggered by some kind of sensation. A subtle vague emotion or feeling.
@@c.s.842 What we remember is what we have an emotional connection to.
Thanks a lot for this interesting lecture Mark Solms, and thanks also to the Royal Institution for making this possible.
It's when studying for a tedious exam, other subjects seem most remarkable.
No matter if the Subject is more or less complicated.
Amazed how true this is!
@@arnevajsing7120 *,,🙂
Can't agree more 🙃
Actually, this is a very remarkable YTV conversation.
‘The dogs are the chicken’
Brilliantly laughable! lol I have a seizure condition and have been very interested in brain activity since, as I often noticed deja vu and floating feelings in body, many occasions of which were precursors to having a seizure. I also an quite interested in dream activists well since I have felt a dreamlike stage during my absence of reality. It has been a pleasure to struggle to learn as much as I can understand about my condition and my curiosity to cross these uploads on RUclips. Much respect to the Royal Institute for sharing, and even more so given to Mr. Mark Solms.
Thank you infinitely!
Peace and love 💕
Incredible talk on consciousness! Thank you Dr. Solms!
without defining consciousness?-That is no more than mouthing empty words
@@vhawk1951kl Oh, I misinterpreted you above. You are suggesting that the information and the evidence, provided by Dr Solm is somehow devoid of .....what? Consciouness? He DEFINED consciousness at the beginning, middle and end of his talk, did he not? Are you mouthing empty words without understanding the basis of his presentation. It seems to me that certain people from an echo chamber find themselves on science sites wanting to argue about consciousness when really they want to fight over "gee, this world is one without any kind of spirituality" when this is plain nonsense & a straw man argument at the very least. Of course I could be entirely wrong about this. If I am, then I apologise. But it was your manner. Your specific response.
@@vhawk1951kl No such thing as a correct definition of consciousness if you're not willing to consider all important ideas. If you dislike this video because you haven't learned anything from it then that's your problem.
@@larmaytv36 Does that not depend entirely on your criteria for "correct"? - "correct" according to who? If you are the arbiter of "correct" correct" in what sense do you use the word*correct*- the mathematical sense?
"There is no*correct*definition of consciousness" - you say: ecce the hazards of universals, which the uncharitable might characterise as simply sloppy thinking.
Clearly your famous and - for you, indefinable "consciousness" is to be found in a very forest of universals and sloppy thinking- To say nothing of pouring from the empty into the void.
There is absolutely no difficulty whatsoever with defining "consciousness" for anyone with any wits and learning. Whoever made that sweeping generalisation and other forms of universal, clearly lacks both.
If whoever makes an assertion cannot define what he means by "consciousness" or at least set out clearly what he seeks means or intends to convey by a particular word had best not use it at all- On any view it is no more than drivel
"Homeostasis resits entropy" loved that!!
That kinda follows by definition. Entropy is the thing that works to make everything exactly like everything else (hence the whole "heat death of the Universe" thing which has nothing to do with death and everything to do with the Universe becoming completely homogeneous where nothing interesting can happen anymore), while homeostasis literally meaning "staying the same" (this specific thing, locally, that is unlike other stuff around it). It kinda goes without saying these two work against each other - entropy CAN be resisted, in a strictly local context, by an appropriate system, which is why fridges can exist; and that's just what homeostasis does.
The "Living state' is a state described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and it requires Gibbs free energy input for homeostasis. This is not unique to living complexity, but is characteristic of all hierarchically organized complex systems. They tend to disintegrate into their more basic sub-units, without energy input for maintenance (homeostasis is maintaining this desired maintenance state in living systems).
@@pbredder ,,p
!!! That's what struck me as the most profound statement as well.
This is the only thing I've seen which actually advanced my understanding of consciousness - thanks! Most talks either propose a solution which misses the point of the hard problem, or discuss the hard problem without advancing a solution.
And how is this a solution? He didn't really explain why feelings can't happen "in the dark", unless I missed something. Interesting nonetheless.
I think the answer may be that consciousness itself is a feeling. Also I think that the ability to discern different types of feelings gives rise to the feeling of consciousness. The point though is that there is only one small part of the brain that turns out the lights completely.
@@iAnasazi I can understand what the term "subconscious thought" refers to, but I can't imagine what an unconscious feeling would be. If you aren't conscious of a feeling, how could you say you were feeling it at all?
@@nommopilot That's just language games. Feelings can be defined purely functionally, as in "the most plausible explanation for behaviour x is (involving) feeling y". On the other hand, you could equate "feeling" with "consciousness" a priori, which still explains nothing.
The hypothesis that feelings are evolutionary adaptations in order to maintain homeostasis is brilliant! I have often thought to myself, what if I had no feelings; if I could only observe my surroundings, like a security camera, with no sensations of touch, taste, smell, hearing or emotion. Would I be conscious? What would differentiate "me" from a simple camera or a computer? If one feels nothing, and has no unique sensations or emotions, and no "individual qualities" to self-reference, would that STILL allow one to experience consciousness? A fascinating lecture...
It’s called being in silence
Mmmm. Interesting. I think if one "feels nothing" then the hypothesis would be that you would not, in fact, be able to experience consciousness. This is because the positioning of this consciousness or "the feel" (as the article by Solm demonstrated) is part of the cortical area of the brain but also occurs because of a working brain stem. Without the brain stem there is no "experience." You mentioned "no unique sensations" -but that must include 'seeing'.
To observe is also 'seeing' and thus unique to you. The other issue that the brain, not being like a computer, but organic, can develop into a 'thinking' or seeing creation, which means that there is a possibility of you experiencing feelings even if you could not linguistically describe these. If you were simply an engineering device, like a camera, you would not. But fascinating!!
YT is a great place for learning. I'm a post grad in music (not science). I had to explain to students that data and empirical evidence was still essential. It was not always a prescriptive idea of feelings or 'interpretations.'
@@Carfeu *trump voice* wrong
A non conscious thing cannot become conscious as an evolutionary adaptation. How does something that has no feelings develop feelings? At a point you'll have to accept that we are designed by a creator!
Right yes, The first thing I stated in my response was that without feelings, without consciousness, you cannot experience further feelings. At no point did Solm state you can have a non-conscious being which then develops an affect. You need to have this within certain elements of your brain (I'm keeping this simple) already. Specific patients, when examined have been shown to have a clear affect with a description of their surroundings etc. So it's an essence of the emotion that we should be aware of it. The attribute of the possibility of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions and affects are concerned.
The other issue is that at no point does evolution in humanity mean that we can't have been created by a god figure. The Judeo- Christian Islamic tradition supports evolution in human growth. Believing in a god does not cancel the function of consciousness or the explanation of our existence thru aspects of adaptation. This is not contingent on there not being a creator.
I find GREAT sustenance within science to help explain our ability to adapt. If we believe in this, we may identify as creatures of a creator who work within NATURAL law. Which is how god, when you interpret scriptures, works himself. We are never asked by god to ACCEPT the idea of a creator, or worse, be forced to. Which your comment hints at. But we are asked to have faith. To accept is wrong in its entirety. No-one should 'accept' anything unless it is an observable fact. Or as a small child, we are told, by parents: "accept that this is a rule: you will eat dinner at 6pm" But we are not children (don't then tell me that god expects us to be nothing but children.....I suspect that's the next item on your list! :) ).
Still, this a great platform of discussion on brain development, where the statement appeared that an unconscious being CANNOT itself develop an affect. You can't put anything in an empty vessel that lacks brain 'elements' (simply stated), Chukwuma
Keep watching. It's an excellent discussion.
This is beautiful, I can't thank you enough for being the vessel through which this knowledge got to me.
I’m touched by your brilliance, your wit, and the prospect of a theory of consciousness that puts raw emotion “downtown” in theories of consciousness - where I feel it belongs. :) I also appreciate your candidness, sharing the story of your brother’s injury in the context of your life as a person and as a scientist. You’re truly amazing. Thank you for this lecture, and for your work in the field. It’s inspiring!
Thank you Mark Solms . To make an analogy of the connection between function and feeling I would say that the function of my car engine is to bring me in my car to visit the seaside and experience the sea birds and the surf on my face .So my point is that while studying the workings of the engine of my car that will get me there I will never get to understand or feel the experience of my seaside trip .
When you were speaking about how a physiological event changed your brother, I was reminded on how frightening losing the ability to speak is. I know its nothing like what your brother, and family went through, but, during a migraine I was awakened to the realisation that you are very much separate from everything else. When you lose the ability to take words which you know full well, inside your head, and the migraine or bleed or whatever, changes your ability to communicate, it wakes you up to the fact that we are, very much, insular beings who can become trapped inside our own heads. Luckily its a transient phenomena for myself but nowadays I have a very real fear of anything like this happening again. I also disagree that behind the injury we are not ourselves, how do you know? I felt very much like myself but to the world I appeared very different...its nightmarish!
That sounds terrifying. I imagined it in my head and it sounds horrible. I hope I dream about it one day.
That's horrifying. The closest experience I have of being trapped inside myself would have to be when under sleep paralysis.
Vedanta is the very science of consciousness at both human and cosmic levels. It recognises consciousness as the ultimate reality and affirms its presence in all existence.
All this- whatever exists in this changing universe, is pervaded by consciousness"
--Isa Upanishad .5000-BCE
The ancient Vedic rishis in all their wisdom said as early as 8000 BC , that our universe is not woven from matter but consciousness . (They never patent there knowledge there own name ) There are connections between quantum mechanics & consciousness .
Consciousness is the intelligence, the organising principle behind the arising of form. The quantum field or pure consciousness is influenced by intention and desire.
All atoms in the entire universe are capable of mind reading and communicating with other atoms. There is a consciousness in every molecule of matter.
As per quantum physics things do not exist in its physical form, unless they are observed by a conscious observer.
In every experiment when an observer expected energy to behave as a particle, it did so. When he thought it would probably be wave-like, it was. And when observers believed it might start out as one form and end up as another, it did so.
This means ,nothing actually exists in its physical form until observed by someone, was adopted by the group as one of the concepts. You created them by your expectations and your thoughts of what should be. In every situation in your life, including the wealth or lack of it you choose to attract to you.
Biology is a quantum process. All the processes in the body including cell communications are triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appear at the quantum level.
On the subatomic level-mind is over matter. The brain and DNA is governed by the laws of quantum physics rather than the laws of biology or neuro physiology.
THE COSMOS IS THE PLAYGROUND OF MAYA.. FROM MICROCOSM TO MACROCOSM..
Bhagavad Gita is all about BEING IN THE MOMENT.
You cannot change your past, you cannot survive without water, you cannot change natures principle. The only solution is to accept things as they are.
Life is a combination or physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects. Without spiritual development , man is without love or positive emotions ( affection, care, respect, sympathy ) .
Karma is the result of your actions. If you do something good, you will get good tings in return and if you do bad things, you will get likewise in return.
Karma or the actions that you do in the present life is passed on to the next life. But fate is not passed on to the next life.
Dharma is when we are walking the path of our soul's purpose. When we are walking our path we are out of karma. We are no longer creating cause and effect. We are in flow with the universe, with our spirit. Our soul is line with the Divine.
'Manu-Smiriti'- 5000BC describes the code for leading a disciplined way of life.
Patience, Pardon, Suppression of will, Stay away from Theft, Purity, Control of desires, Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth, Controlling Anger. These 10 qualities are considered as main characteristics of the Dharma.
The whole of material creation is conscious. Our consciousness creates our reality. What our consciousness can conceive , it can also create.
Human beings are conscious. They can see themselves in the mirror and see colours, while an animal cannot.
To a Vedantic every part of this universe is dynamic, it is vibrating, it is listening and can respond according to ones KARMA, It can be by action and can be purely thought. The universe listens to our action as well as thought and gives in return what exactly we want either knowingly or unknowingly, weather it is bad or good.
Science is trying to understand the universe ‘out there’ and Vedanta addressed the universe ‘inside you’”
Schrödinger, in speaking of a universe in which particles are represented by wave functions, said, “The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.”
The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West. There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction… The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. - Erwin Schrödinger
" You do not have a soul ,
you are a soul and you have a body "
@@AmitKumar-qz2us STOP SPAMMING NONSENSE! THIS IS NOT ABOUT RELIGION WHICH ALREADY OUTDATED HUNDRED YEARS AGO. GO BACK TO STONE AGE
@@facttruth7571 i feel like if you watch Dr. Solms and come away less convinced rather than more in the primacy and importance of subjective interpretation of the world/the things within it then you've very much missed the point
Wow-this was fantastic! And the fact that he’s worked with Karl Friston just seals it for me!
I was just browsing through and I stumbled on this I just want to say you’re simply amazing just because even someone like me you explain it so easy and everyone can understand your a legendary hero man
I feel that same......
28:28 I've been watching science-related videos for over 10 years on this platform, but never had I been referred to as a scientist by a scientist on RUclips's spacetime continuum. Thank you for such an experience.
Really *Whose* " science of *What*?
Owing to the loss of the capacity to ponder and reflect,
whenever the contemporary average man hears or employs in conversation any word(perhaps " science, or " consciousness") with which he is familiar only by its consonance, he does not pause to think, nor
does there even arise in him any question as to what exactly is meant by this word, he having already decided,
once and for all, both that he knows it and that others
know it too.
Do you see that you simply*assume* that you know what you mean by either "science" , or " consciousness" and it never even crosses you mind to seek to discover exactly what passes in you associations or associative apparatus or mind, or thoughts(so- called).
Is that not*Exactly* correct?
Not only is it and must it be correct, for the very simply reason that you*cannot*.
How exactly would you go about doing that and is it not the exact equivalent of a mirror seeking to reflect itself, or you stand on your own shoulders?
Can you understand that?
A scientific touch to the deep relationship between feelings and consciousness. Well presented 😊💃‼️
What a great lecture!! Thanks to Mark Solms and the RI.
What do all conscious beings have in common? When asked to deliver a lecture of a certain length, they fall behind and have to rush at the end.
Simple! The awareness of being alive, a
Uh, will, let me unfreeze you. Simple. An awareness of being alive, a sense of being instead of nonbeing, that you exist occupying time and space, that you have volume, weight, and height. Happy?
Hey, RUclips! Where is my text here? Are ypu guys censoring me Again?!!!
Self ID.
It is a complicated matter and it is not easy to distill all the complexities of the problem in a 1 hour lecture. At least I bothered to read his book. I am sure you did not.
Brilliant, in the US sense! Theoretical physicist and mathematician by trade, but I've always had intense interest in philosophy and philosophy of everything. BUT, especially to the problem of "me" and physic processes. I'm buying the book as I type. Thanks for awakening me to this unique approach existing.
Do you believe as Hawlins said "philosophy is dead"
The way I see it. Feelings evolved to help us survive in groups. You are happy, you are safe. Your body can relax. You are sad, because something bad happened that might change the outlook on your future survival. Feelings that are basic emotions that are easy for other group members to see.
@@pmcguinness3041 Interesting. I wonder what defines a decision when presented with multiple options. Do you follow a group laughing or do you help the group crying? I guess empathy is a survival emotion too?
@@pmcguinness3041 God made us conscious and breathed "life" and information into our DNA, THAT .is called intelligent design. human kind will never create life
@@bknyland4134 Which God? And who/what made them?
@@bknyland4134 thats too lazy thing to label everything out of mind as god. The universe is complex beyond the human mind at least for present time but this will not be the case forever.
@@DillaCat THE GOD of the Bible. The Father, The Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit. No one "made" them. God exists outside of time, space and matter. Our Human brains cannot even conceive how this is possible.
I believe, like Dr. Solms states, that the source of emotions and thus foundational consciousness does reside in the (primitive) brainstem. The reticular activating systems (RAS) also, by the way, regulates some foundational aspects of attention. We need the RAS, for example, to filter the voices from the background noise at a cocktail party. So this brainstem does have a very fundamental role in our mental functions. It makes sense also from an evolutionary perspective. But the insight of homeostasis as the mechanism (the pendulum) of maintaining order and fighting entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) is absolutely brilliant. Life cannot exist with uncontrolled entropy. Life by definition is natures ability to create self-regulating systems that maintain homeostasis, the balance needed for all metabolic organisms to exist. And self-replication adds the ability of these systems to evolve under different environments. It is logical that evolution would bring about adaptive strategies to maintain a stable homeostatic state in a given environment. And as self-replicating populations adapt to new environments through mutations, evolution ensures the adaptability of lifeforms. And with the emergence of animal life, after the Cambrian explosion 540 million years ago, the animal kingdom would develop nervous systems capable regulating behavior (emotions are our evolutionary regulation of behavior) based on the homeostatic state of the individual and the predictive ability to secure this healthy, necessary state. This is all brilliant!! The neocortex (the pallium) also added a very large extension to our cognitive capabilities. This clearly also extended our capabilities of self-awareness. An awareness of self in a given environment and our ability to also change that environment in order to secure our homeostasis. This extended self-awareness is what makes us human. We are aware of our ability to modify our environment and also to feel empathy for other beings (other persons or agents). This the next level of awareness, our social awareness. We are aware of what others are aware of and even worried about what others are not aware of. This is evolutions next level. So I would also infer, that is also the next level of consciousness.
Why are we so confused about our emotions? Always confuse the cause and then affect people around us.
Yes. Great summary, and comment, Joe Perez. This is was the point in the talk where I pricked up my ears. Interesting.
Yes, I agree that his connection of consciousness to the body's evolutionary need to maintain homeostasis was to me the most profound insight.
"I believe ... consciousness does reside in the (primitive) brainstem."
And how does it emerge? What is the mechanism?
@@rubiks6 "Is this not the place we should be looking if we're trying to find out what the functional mechanism of consciousness is?" (40:50-ish) This is obviously a great and essential question, but we're not there yet. Neuroscientists don't even agree on where to look for this mechanism at present, but the evidence elucidated in this video at least strongly suggests a definite answer to the where: the brain stem.
Such an excellent talk 👏🏻
This is the first time I’ve heard a well reasoned and explained justification for why consciousness is beneficial for survival, and therefore why it would have evolved at all.
I’m already reading it, and it’s making ‘sense’ to me and ‘affecting’ me greatly. Wonderful book. Thank you Mark!
Sorry, but the quality of experiences are not brain-based (including the brain stem) for the simple reason that consciousness did not emerge from brain matter. Consciousness is the ontological primary.
@@michaelseale7268 and how do you know that?
@A. George He took psychedelics and the clockwork elves from base reality told him.
@@michaelseale7268 After stimulation of your brain stem, you say otherwise ;)
@@michaelseale7268 Modern science needs to point to a mechanical cause of a sense of Being or consciousness. They discount research in psychedelics , even though many prominent researchers have used them, because their careers are based in 'hard' physical reductionist thought. Finding truth in the Universe is up to the individual, not academia.
What a powerful thesis on Brain Stem Spring, Sensing, Micro-Sensing, Sensibility, The Involuntariness of Sensibility, Micro-Consciousness, The Core of Feeling, Why Emotions Are Critical, How Malcognition Has Us To Willingly Go Unevolutipn & More.
I would have given this talk in reverse. The content was amazing but the later parts were more crucial for the main idea and the most key point here was the one given last. Maybe it's just me who wants to know the agenda first and the details later
Got to start at the beginning isn't it? Us cab drivers are also watching :)
The ability to ask what makes us conscious is exactly what makes us couscious in a sharable way.
Its not the thought itself but our ability to observe the thought.
@@sanchos9084 And since US then share right ?
@@colinpatterson728 sorry i didn’t understand the question 😅
@@sanchos9084 I think you understood well enough! I actually agree with your "NOT the thought itself" - I think in essence it contains all the other stuff. I mean one has to be conscious to even respond !
@@colinpatterson728 I’ve been meditating for a year and it was transformative. I think we should understand that language is limited when it comes to describing subjective experiences and conciseness can be experienced only from subjective experience. I think we shouldn’t be surprised if woo woo stuff mystics talk about come to be true.
I use 3D Markovian decision geometry for expressing other things in our species common social issues. These mathematical structures seem to be everywhere.
My brain literally had the feeling of popping with ecstacy when this lecture turned on some lights.
Thanks, I needed that.
Good to have you on board.
Where can I read more about it?
With increasing calls for a science (for an objective science) of consciousness, Solm moves the needle a long way towards the ‘settled’ point … bravo.
Fascinating thanks. I was also lucky to interview Mark for my @Sentientism channel in case you're interested in hearing more from him.
As a Schelerian, I completely agree that feelings are a pre-requisite for consciousness. And if I understand correctly, he's saying the function of feelings demonstrates that they must already be conscious because feelings direct actions and choices (toward what is pleasurable and away from what is painful). I think, though, it would be helpful for him to distinguish the two forms of "consciousness" he's speaking of -
In other words, when he says feelings are a pre-requisite for "consciousness," I think he means the higher consciousness that is characterized by self-awareness and language. When he says "Feelings are always conscious," though, I think he means a lower form of consciousness that is pre-lingual. Some philosophers argue that this second type of consciousness is common to all organic life. For example, the roots of a tree will grow will often toward what is nurturing and away from what is harmful. Some philosophers argue that this is the same sort of "consciousness" that he's ascribing to feelings.
It is the recognition of self within all other elements of existence that we are aware of.
You can flip that idea upside down.
Brilliant - I especially liked the deep brain and pharmacological justifications for believing that the RAS is the font of feeling
Remarkable! This is why fishes and frogs and even insects have a personality. A great reason to become vegetarian.
You make a good point. It is a little disturbing, actually.
I am so happy, all this supports my own theory of consciousness. Feeling.... hunger, thirst, pain, all this is conscious, only in this way can we keep our bodies alive. And in my opinion, all living things will have this ability. Without this ability life would be impossible
" hunger, thirst, pain, all this is conscious"
Can't one assert with equal conviction:
Feeling.... hunger, thirst, pain, all this is instinct?
If I owned a delicatessen on Piccadilly Circus then
I would definitely name my shop, "Piccadelly", "PiccaDelly", PicaDeli...
I like this guy after only 3 mins. One sentence succeeds in explaining that which I've tried to for many years.
We ARE our emotional response to our environment. The individual can be manipulated by manipulation of the environment in which they experience themselves.
Especially noticeable in these times.
what a man for understanding & the truth always comes out & thank you for sharing your truth much appreciated 💜🤗
I tend to view things in terms of evolution, perhaps too much, but useful here for these questions and observations: (1) consciousness is shared by many organisms, so one should expect that the source of consciousness rests in the structures of the brain that all conscious organisms share; (2) one should at least suspect, if not expect, that organisms that share structures of the brain would share the traits associated with them, suggesting that lower organisms experience feelings-including emotions-greater than many people acknowledge; (3) just as affection for offspring and mate provide an evolutionary advantage (defined as getting genes into the next generation), feelings provide an evolutionary advantage in keeping the organism alive longer, thus able to reproduce more.
Your thought is expressed so clearly that it is like a balm to read it. Thank you.
I am extatic to hear this. Finally we can understand animals are somebody not something and we can stop treating them as objects to be exploited. I had this intuition spontaneously in 2013 and I went vegan. Hope all who listen think of animals and their hellish suffering in factory farms and slaughterhouses.
I'm going to disappoint you a little, I think it's great that you've become a vegetarian, the problem is that plants have feelings too. And everything that's alive
I liked his talk, especially that he is following the evidence wherever it leads. I feel that this is not what most people mean by "the hard problem." Solms is trying to answer "why is there an inner experience" in an adaptive evolutionary model. He seems to be saying that feelings must be felt in order to do the function of increasing survival, so this is why we feel, because feeling must be felt to have any effect. This is his "why." Like I said, at least he is following the evidence, but he isn't asking "how is there an inner experience" or "what is consciousness" or any question that I might think of when you say "the hard problem of consciousness."
i still don't follow the logic of why feeling has to be involved. in his example about air hunger in a burning building, it seems to me that very low-level animals would act the same way. the survival mechanism there to escape the danger can happen without any conscious agency on behalf of the organism. why do I need self-awareness and inner experience to flee a burning building?
@@fvhaudsilhvdfs I understand why this answer isn't particularly satisfying, but like I said, he is a scientist in a particular community where some other scientists insist that consciousness is either something like the smoke coming from an engine or an illusion. He is trying to build a case for consciousness being an actual integral part of an evolved organism, so he has to show that it is helpful in survival. I agree with him that emotions are mostly instinctual algorithms that lead to increased fitness, and his point is that feelings must be felt, so there has to be an experiencer, and it has to be conscious. While I agree with that one part, I think his fellow scientists are kind of misguided and silly for discounting consciousness so casually, but that is just my opinion, and I'm not trying to get tenure or be published.
Since childhood, maybe from the age of about 7 or 8, I have questioned myself. " Why am I looking at the world from behind my eyes (a white Englishman in the 20th/21st century) and not for instance a poor Indian woman either now or at any time in history. I still constantly have those thoughts. To me that is the fundamental question of conciousness.
@@captainoates7236 I think many people have asked such questions throughout the ages since consciousness doesn't seem to be anchored in time or space. I don't know the answer any more than any scientist or guru does, but this is my current view. I've come to regard consciousness as "what it feels like for matter to be alive", so every living cell has basic awareness, and the brain provides the perception, memory and emotions to the living matter of my brain. In this view, my consciousness is anchored to this particular configuration of matter until its inevitable dissolution. I don't know how any of this would work or if it makes any sense, but it works for me. I am always open to other ideas since no one has the ultimate answer, and probably never will.
I guess I am asking a different kind of question, even quasi religious, but maybe another definition of conciousness is the ability to conceive of such things and reflect on the world we inhabit.
A brilliant exposition. But can we not go further? Note that Dr. Solms says that when the reticular formation is STIMULATED the subject may feel depression or some other feeling. The point I'm making is that the feeling is generated by some external source--I.e., in this case, the probes in the brain. That is, it is not the brain stem/reticular formation which generates the feeling but, rather, that the brain stem/reticular formation RECEIVES a stimulus. This reinforces in me the hypothesis that consciousness is a fundamental field (just as the electron field or proton field are fundamental) which the brain stem/reticular formation accesses or receives. That is, the brain stem/reticular formation does NOT generate consciousness but receives it perhaps in some way analogous to how a radio receives an electromagnetic signal.
Yes! Thank you.
Very interesting talk. The parts about reactions without cortex make me think more of "awareness" than "feeling". Maybe consciousness has levels of awareness. Awareness of the senses, then awareness of desires and then awareness of thoughts. Dreams for example, have no awareness of the senses, but have awareness of desires and we can experience feelings (fear, infatuation, arousal). Dreams usually lack will power. We don't usually decide what we do when we dream but we wouldn't say our dreamed persona lacks consciousness inside the dream as it acts and reacts within the dream very much like a conscious person. Same with the people we dream of. They are entirely made up, but for us, they look pretty humanly complete in the context of the dream.
I have some willpower in my dreams though 🤔... Some times I just ride along, but some times I find myself making willful decisions... At other times, I find myself in a spectator position (it's like I can sense myself and position, but I'm independent of what that self does... it's like being in a VR game without me doing the movement)
@@joszsz Yeah dreams can be lucid sometimes. I sometimes listen my voice narrating what will happen next in the dream I'm having. I've the suspicion Marvin Minsky was onto something when he wrote (in Society of Mind) about brain functions being composed of many simpler subsystems that can be turned on and off.
What is also very impressive is how much we can still do with most of our brain gone. It'd seem like staying alive, sensing and reacting to the world can be done just with our "reptilian" part of the brain (I think it's the basal ganglia)
@@DamianReloaded Yeah! I do the narration thing too, and it's at that point that I usually realise it's a dream and wake up. It's all so intriguing. I'm not familiar with Marvin though, so I'll have to check his work out
@@DamianReloaded I really liked your comments. I hadn't thought of dreams in an affective manner as the lecture discussed. We need a Part 2!
As a researcher in machine consciousness, this was extremely helpful. Your presentation was as unique as it was insightful, thank you for sharing.
Spoiler alert: we don’t know
Aww
Of course, it will be the last mistery we humans will solve some day, if we ever manage to solve it at all.
I think its because we ultimately are the thing we study, ao we are maybe not possible to understand this fully.
But his work is for sure a big step in the right direction.
I'm sick of the scientists who say something nonsensical like "consciousness is only an imagination and does not really exist", which is absolutely wrong and simply makes no sense!
Consciousness is the only thing we can say 100% that it exists. Everything else, the world around us and all the scientific knowledge those scientists are so proud of, could theoretically be a simulation and not exist.
So completely put on the Kof. This shows that there are successful scientists who understand the simplest things completely wrong and are easily led by their success on a wrong path.
I cant understand how someone could deny that consciousness exists.
It makes no sense at all!
@@JonesP77 Yes. Consciousness - subjective experience - is the only real thing we know. Yet "subjectively" is a kind of derogatory term. It's one of the reasons I'm into psychology more than the conventional sciences, to be honest.
@@JonesP77 It took a few tricks of the mind to do so, but I have discovered what human consciousness is. The word consciousness is misleading. Here we he is speakiing of responding to events which indeed exists in all animals and is in the primitive brain, the stem and its RAS. What we speak of as humans being conscious is another neural proces. I am writing it up now.
@@quicknumbercrunch8691 did ya
"So that sentence: 'Neuropsychology is admirable, but it excludes the psyche' captured exactly my dismay and frustration with my field. Such was how things stood in the 1980's." Mark Solms
its 2021.
good connection, compression, camera and streaming picture s more important than a good suit.
dump the suits. throw on a robe and angle the camera respectfully. the future is now
You said something along the lines of "Why are we conscious and why doesn't all of this go on in the dark?"
There cannot be a non-experience for something that collects information and thinks towards a projected future, which can help the organism prepare for winter, etc. That's an adaptation that helps the spieces survive. It has been fine tuned by natural selection, and we call this conscious experience.
Patient W has more sense of humour without frontal cortex than I do.
It's cooking food that makes us conscious?
What
@@thegreath.sapiensapien6907 Don't know about making us conscious, but going back into deep time, I imagine cooking food and keeping warm at nights, had a heck of a lot to do with being able to grow this super-sized brain we inhabit.
Well, that was quite a humourous comment you just made! Don't disparage yourself!
Hahahahahahahahahaha!
This is the best and most incredible talk on YT
I have learned, when I was in college in one of my classes that when the brain is “short changed” in a part, or parts of its anatomy either by surgery or by lack of the part in birth, another part, or parts, of the brain “steps up” to fulfill the job of the missing part as much as it can. Until such time as we understand more about how the brain works and where various functions occur and how and where the neurotransmitters go, we can learn where control initiates, but as far as inferring “backup parts” that can take over temporarily, or permanently in the event of failure or absence, we can never Fully Understand the workings of the neurons in the brain.
Consciousness is the sum of the connections. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
By this argument you run into the partial ship building problem, essentially contending you become a fundamentally different person separate from your former self anytime one of your neurons die.
That's really interesting!
Especially to me, as it turns out my brainstem was pushed slowly but steadily for at least 15 or 20 years (I'm 43 now) by a giant (by the official classification at 51x43x33mm) vestibular schwannoma.
That's a benign (is most cases) slow growing tumor growing out of the Schwann cells, in my case of the vestibular-acoustic nerve. Schwann cells are like the insulation around the nerve very much like the insulation on cables.
The thing is the tumor as it has grown so big, has gradually pushed my brainstem way to the left side (it has started on the right side nerve). The brainstem, which normally should be going straight down in the middle from the base of the brain to spinal cord in my case has been pushed way left, so that's making about a 90 degrees turn to go around the tumor, almost from the top end of the brainstem, to the bottom of the cerebellum, where the brainstem returns to its normal position.
That's actually the main reason to believe it has been growing very slowly, as it has managed to make such deformation without noticeable effects.
Actually one of the few effects I got from it (which I didn't know at the time) were only about 3 months before I went to get a scan and found about the tumor, and it was for about a week in the summer in which I got overwhelming urge to yawn or swallow without a reason. And about a week later it was gone, I was back to some kind of normal (which apparently hasn't been normal for me for many years already).
In any case that brainstem reticular formation that Mark Solms mentions as the source of our Consciousness, in my case was extremely deformed. Most likely not directly damaged, but at least pressed and pushed to the side.
Also I assume there has been some manipulation in the region during the surgery I got to remove the tumor.
Apparently the surgery was good (even if quite long - 14 hours) as I don't experience any noticeable physical effects from all this.
There are other things like a moderate hydrocephalus, which was initially caused by the tumor completely compressing flat the 4th ventricle, and thus disturbing the normal reabsorption cycle of the cerebrospinal fluid.
And also the scan that found the tumor, showed that I has a cyst of water on the outer right-side surface of the right-hemisphere, which doctors are saying is probably condition which I had from a baby. As result it pushed against my right hemisphere, and it got slightly underdeveloped as size at least. It's difficult to measure deficits in the functions of the right-brain hemisphere I guess.
Sorry for the long description, but to summarize I wonder if that extreme deformation of my brainstem has affected my consciousness somehow?
I would not imagine so. The brainstem is so crucial for life itself, that if it was somehow damaged, the clinical manifestations would be obvious.
With so few side effects, however did they find the problem?
@@She_Nanigans I guess that's why the tumor grew for many years before it started to manifest as side-effects (initially with balance and hearing degradation in affected ear)
@@blueckaym oh, I see. I hope you have good health going forward.
For someone with such a strange condition , your text proves that consciousness, intellect and language have not been at all hindered.
Best of Health to you going forward!
We are not a machine and the mind goes ways beyond the brain. There is stacks of evidence on this. Thank you for sharing and I hope you will continue your research 'outside' of the body.
I fill the issue with your brother, is a 'confusion' between the two brain hemispheres.
This was fascinating, going to read this ASAP.
Thank you very very much Mark this is absolutely fascinating. I would like to repeat as Patrick says below -RI please please stop putting time limits. I seek these subjects and are prepared to listen and think. This is not the kind of facebook click sensation 2 millisecond attention span stuff which seems to be becoming the norm - I was able to get a fairly good grasp of this really complex subject after listening 3 times to the lecture and having invested well over 50 hours exploring other sources on this subject this is by far the best.
Do you see or recognise or understand, that when you use words such as "consciousness", you simply *assume* that you know what you mean by them or seek to convey when you use them?
Owing to the loss of the capacity to ponder and reflect,
whenever the contemporary average man hears or employs in conversation any word with which he is familiar
only by its consonance, he does not pause to think, nor
does there even arise in him any question as to what exactly is meant by this word, he having already decided,
once and for all, both that he knows it and that others
know it too.
Is it not exactly correct that he has no idea and never even pauses to question or seek to discover exactly what passes in his associations or their relevant apparatus when he hears or uses that word?
Why not? Because he *cannot*, because he is doing the psychological equivalent of trying to stand on his own shoulders or a mirror seeking to reflect itself.
Is that not *exactly* true?
Consciousness is light and sound experiencing reflections
It’s everywhere, not always correct
This was an amazing video, extremely interesting. Thank you so much.
Consciousness arises from a mind that is split. Once split, the mind becomes a perceived rather than a knower. For this, the body was made (You must perceive something and WITH something). Purification of perception through right thinking is how we return to a whole mind and to knowing.
If we make consciousness fundamental, rather than being generated by the brain, the hard problem disappears.
There is nothing impenetrable, everything shares with time and cosmos, your understanding is the impenetrable.
We are feeling tubes of love flushing and transforming energy, language and reality, get opened with love nerdy bug.
The ideas around 54 minute mark remind me a lot of Terrence Deacon's ideas. I think this is the path forward. Very good presentation, I wish you good luck!
Good and bad are RELATIVE. 😉
@@TheWorldTeacher - Oh no they're not. They are absolute. God decides what is good and bad. The Creator of the universe and of Man decides what is right and what is wrong and His determinations are unmovable.
The moment a particle is a wave; it has to be a conscious wave!
Nicola Tesla states, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe,
think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration”
Gravity is the conscious attraction among waves to create the illusion of particles,
and creates our experience-able Universe.
Max Planck states: "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from Consciousness".
Life is the Infinite Consciousness, experiencing the Infinite Possibilities, Infinitely.
We are "It", experiencing our infinite possibilities in our finite moment.
Our job is to make it interesting!
Dear Dr. Solms, thank you for your researches, always so concrete and stimulating.
Now you move the seat of consciousness from the cortex to the brain stem. But don't you think this was already Jaak Panksepp's line?
Unfortunately this does not solve the “hard” problem, but simply displaces it.
it does
@@scarziepewpew3897 it doesn't :)
You are an amazing man Mark Solms.
Even if the brain stem is the seat of consciousness, why do feelings need to actually be felt for organisms to act in response to negative stimuli? If feelings are caused by neural activity, why don't organisms simply act in response to this neural activity instead of going through the middleman of conscious perception? For instance, instead of lack of food -> neural activity corresponding with hunger -> feeling of hunger -> action to end hunger, why isn't the causal chain simply lack of food -> neural activity corresponding to hunger -> action to end hunger?
If consciousness plays an important role in the survival of conscious organisms, then consciousness must NOT be epiphenomenal, i.e. it must exert a causal influence on organisms' physical behavior. In order to justify the position that consciousness exerts this sort of "top-down" influence, one must explain the mechanism(s) by which this occurs. Maybe Dr. Solms was getting to this at the end, but I would have liked to see him delve into this seemingly glaring hole in his theory.
Read the book, it elaborates on this in fairly extensive detail (i'd rather not do Solms the disservice of poorly explaining)
His book explains it.
IMO the causal chain is better because the second one without realization of hunger you won't realize you need food.
Oh My God!
Well, I don’t rationally believe in god but that expression sums up my FEELINGS toward this exquisite talk. Thank you!!!
Very effectively and clearly explained. Thanks a lot!
There is so much that physicalism can't properly explain no matter how hard scientists try. I wish I could tell RUclips to stop suggesting this guy. I've heard him and found him wanting.
Brilliant talk!. Loved the way you elucidated and teased out this problem. The problem of consciousness is something I have thought about for a very long time (I'm 65 now) without anyone in my life really wanting to engage with me about it. I will be getting your book (I'm in the UK). Thank you very much
have a look at Dan Dennet as well, guess you already aware of him, but just in case
@@LuigiSimoncini Hi there. Thanks for your reply. Yes I have seen some talks of his online. Very interesting. As far as I understand him ( and others such as Sam Smith?) he makes the case for a materialist, neurological basis for the experience of being conscious. However to me it still seems unexplained how our subjective conscious experience generates out of billions of organic neurons firing in response to sensory input signals. Such an interesting topic. The more I look the deeper the rabbit hole seems to get.
Sam Harris..not Sam Smith :)
Thank you very much, Dr Solms, I enjoyed your lecture. Removal of Cortext, Consciousness continues. Removal of Brain, Consciousness continues, How about removal of Brain Stem ? There has been cases of NDE (NearDeath Experiences) where the brain is considered clinicaly dead, but the Consciouseness continues until the person was revived. Just a point of argument, not to disrupt your wonderful lecture.
Fascinating talk on consciousness thank you, this type of learning is what the internet was invented for.
in 8 months this has 1 upvote and my comment.... wtf people
Simple as the truth. This is what humanity needs know.
This was absolutely brilliant. It makes a lot of sense. Raw emotions in the brainstorm. I'll be thinking about this for a long time. I cannot help but now think of the "factor 5" model of personality. This would seem to tie in very nicely.
Thanks!
We're glad you enjoyed it!
This is such an insightful lecture and explains so much of the importance of emotions in our lives as well as our individual and collective survival / prosperity. These emotional and awareness connections to the brain stem region would be mostly new to the majority of viewers, in my humble opinion (?) Thanks so much !
AP. If the children with hydranencephaly (who do not have a cerebral cortex) are feeling and reacting as you describe, what stimuli is this in response to? They cannot hear if they do not have an auditory cortex, cannot see without a visual cortex and cannot detect touch without a parietal cortex. They cannot have voluntary movement without a motor cortex. The responses of the children seem to not be purely reflexes, but to be in response to environment. Is there, for example, some reprogramming of the brainstem to detect stimuli, etc?
The necessary means to consciousness is introspection.
One awakens through self-observation and observation of life.
The flower blooms because of its root.
This appears to be a circular argument. Who or what was doing that initial introspection?
@@dkathrens77 You are making obscure what is obvious.
Introspect. Know thyself.
@@dkathrens77 Hi Dennis.
Some people may want to intellectualize. Wrong idea.
Simply gain insight from your life experiences through introspection (meditation, looking inward, self-observation.)
It's that simple.
BIG thank you Mark Solms - so very interesting. And so very important for future of humankind - e.g.; using the knowledge as at least one intrinsic aspect in developments of the best we can do in AI - including ethics, etc.
I am thinking the same! Although I'm not a neuroscientist, I know biology very well and enough of how computers work. Sometimes I ponder through that same question too, like how does a brain work. Once a time I wrote down what I think how I think and it kinda starts to become jumbled first. But when I continue to write (although for some reason I feel a pain in my head when I do that), it kinda always went to a central system that decides what to do, what's bad or good. Then if I connect that system to the theory of evolution, the conclusion that I get is the system that decides what to do must have been selected to maintain its body to be alive, that's homeostasis!
Nice lecture, but this doesn't explain the qualia of feelings. Something deeper is required.
@@WisdomTeachings yeah, that's another beast
The beginning of consciousness is intention sensitivity maintainance and awareness of logics
Here's a question I often wonder about: Suppose we had total control of the mind. Would we be able to synthesize completely new emotions and feelings, or would they all fall into existing categories? If we dashed to an alien planet, would the aliens experience the same feelings as we do? Is the space of feeling unbounded, or does everything fall into happy/sad/excited/pain/anger/etc. Is there a "froopy" feeling that we just cannot begin to understand but Xorax the Squid-like Alien feels every day?
Not sure. A dog can smell 400 times more than we can. We can do the maths and understand the engineering in the olfactory system but we don’t have a clue what that range of ability would be like as an experience. Same with the blind woman who understood the mechanics of sight but had absolutely no notion of the sight experience. Maybe, with the aliens, if we needed to take on those extra senses from a purely survival point of view, we could do it.
Is mind just a sum total of collection of thoughts, emotions, feelings, instincts or is there something more to it? Are we conscious of ourselves and the world, because of the knowledge that we have collected from childhood or regardless of it? Is there anything else there inside, besides this collective identity we call mind?
@@Bhavik630 No consciousness has nothing to do with a collection of data. We come into the world with consciousness, it is innate .
Finally some solid progress on solving the Hard problem of consciousness. I've always held that consciousness was innately tied to feeling vs information processing but this research show that it is also localized in the brain stem. Mark also further proposes that consciousness imparts evolutionary advantages by means of providing another layer of feedback-control for regulation and survival.
So what then is unique about the cells, structures and chemicals in this region that make it the seat of consciousness? What layer of the onion is ultimately conscious? Is it at the level of a network of cells and chemical signals; can an isolated cell 'feel'; is matter itself on some primordial level conscious?
My hypothesis is that feeling IS a fundamental characteristic of physical reality. But how can we test a single cell or even a molecule for its capacity to feel? Where does reductionism end and we say that well, we need at least a network of 'x' cells communicating with 'y' chemicals to support consciousness? I posit that the particular cells, chemicals and structures found in the brain stem are unique only in the manner in which 'inherent consciousness' can express itself through complex networks. The physical world is inherently conscious.
Will neuroscience reach a limit of what it can state which is linguistic, empirical or physical (as Quantum Mechanics has)? What a fascinating journey towards finding ourselves. The Buddha is smiling for a reason ... I feel.
Great video and great explanation Mark!
Brilliant and wonderfully stated.
Described like this, "feeling" seems to be just another algorithm that the brain runs in order to ensure survival. So this doesn't really solve the hard problem: why there is such thing as subjective experience? Why a philosophical zombie would not be just as fit as a "person"? How can we be sure that Mark Solms is not himself/itself a philosophical zombie?
Pretty well said.
If you had information but no motivation (largely derived from feelings) you might be at a disadvantage.
@@PMA65537 it might be the sign of enlightenment.
I'm not sure it's possible to be a zombie. Any sufficiently complex system that understands the world will create an understanding of the other agents in the world and how they behave, given that situation why wouldn't the same system also then have an understanding of it's own agency in the world in the exact same manner. I think you could only have zombies if there was no consistent action free of any consistent motivation of action. I see consciousness as a feedback loop with a scale related to the complexity of brain containing it.
@@robbiero368
Such self knowledge would be greatly facilitated by ‘mirror neurones’ …… which we humans possess !
Perhaps our sleep dreams allow us to discover the explanations of the unconscious feelings, as long as the symbols in the dreams are properly interpreted. The human body must depend on homeostasis for proper functioning; all body organs rely on homeostasis, be it our mind, liver, heart, etc. A recurring dream is evidence that a message is in need of a proper explanation to correct an imbalance in the mind. Pain and suffering screams to us that all is not well, regardless of the organ(s) requiring attention. My experience is that for those seeking Consciousness, it can take a lifetime to resolve lack of mental homeostasis.
Mark Solms makes good Sense to me; he gives evidence of our innate ability to resolve complicated issues.
One hypothesis for some dreams is the brain trying out what-if scenarios to extrapolate_ learning without having to experience the exact situation
But what is AWARE of the raw feelings?
Other people you are trying to survive with.
"Raw" feelings would just be chemical signals, nothing more.
Appreciation is key for a healthy consciousness
Consciousness a great unknown...
Thank you The Ri 👍
Or maybe consciousness is a great KNOWN and the material world ia the great unknown.
@@ReasonableForseeability
This is the question of thousands of years.
Who knows maybe you're right...
Thank you! Now we all know that knowledge is structured in consciousness.
24:06 but was another trial conducted with new participants and swapped the text on images?
Thank you for the excellent explanation of the pursuit of finding the answer to where "I" might be.
Great talk. Still doesn't solve the hard problem though. Why is it that atoms arranged in a certain way to make a brain stem...how/why in the world does that create "feelings"?
That's what his book is about...
I knew that going in. It will never be answered. Still, a worthwhile talk.
Q1. Because that was the one design that survived out of all the other possible brain cell versions that was not removed from the gene pool over the course of human history. Your question is essentially what Darwin answered in his infamous treatise.
Q2. Stay tuned! One day just like we figured out how our digestive system converts nutrition to energy and waste, we will know the answer to that too...
There are other podcasts that answer this question. As d1p70 says, it is a function of a partly random neural network that happens to work better in its environment than any other one that was selected by that environment to continue its better adapted existence. In its simplest manifestation it provided feedback to the organism that eventually, over millions of years, evolved into "sensations" and "feelings". In its simplest form, it was just a chemical reaction. The gradual development of better detection-reaction systems, aka known now as "neural networks" enabled these increasingly complex sensations to become "consciousness". Let us not forget that there is a very wide spectrum of "consciousness" . It is important to understand that this phenomena, including self-awareness and self-identification, is not confined to the human species. This tends to be under-appreciated because humans are the only species, so far, that have developed a system of verbal communication that can express it in a way that can be passed on to future generations. Apes that have been taught sign language can express their feelings to others, including other apes that understand sign language. Species without language are restricted to sharing and expressing feelings by things like body contact.
I like the idea that the brain is in a predictive processing state, constantly trying to guess what will happen next and prepare for it. Emotions, aka "feelings" are, in our holographic memory, relate to situations and events in the past.
Ex: walking past a bakery you smell fresh bread. Your mouth waters. You notice you feel hungry. You find yourself altering course to walk into that bakery as your body prepares to consume and digest some bread.
"You" thought it was "YOUR" IDEA. "You" only got the memo after the event. Free will? "You" may decide to eat something else, but no part of "you" will decide to NOT EAT--why? Because "you" won't survive long enough to pass on "your" genetic material.
Thank you Mark, I will put your book on The List.
Fascinating and illuminating, definitely going to buy the book! It leaves me wondering, does this imply that the origin of consciousness coincides with the origin of life? Because in order for life to exist there must be a preference for survival and in order to have preference there must be some feeling of positive or negative. Would this mean that even the simplest of organisms have some degree of consciousness?
Organisms with behaviour not conducive to their survival are wiped from the gene pool. The gene pool is everything that survived. I think we still need to figure out how a simple circuit within the brain stem can generate a conscious feeling. Why just there? What about the overall process of life within the biosphere, which also encompasses complex cycles, some of them self-perpetuating? Does it have feelings, as it stumbles along blindly responding to changes imposed by externalities such as sunlight? I doubt it. But if not, why not?
you probably want to read/listen to Terrence Deacon or Jeremy Sheldon
Maybe, maybe not. I find it interesting that AI researches who are thinking about making reward functions for future AIs can't make a reward function which isn't terrible. They constantly stumble into paradoxes and dead ends, which either don't exist when it comes to humans or they are much less of an issue with humans. Who knows, maybe consciousness is the best way of having reward functions for complex organisms and so the evolution chose consciousness organisms. Maybe AI research will have to make AIs of the future conscious if they want their AIs to have reward functions which work well. A guy from computerphile made a series of videos talking about problems with AIs and problems of reward function with AIs.
@@dakrontu unless conciousness is fundamental
The problem with emotional feelings (feeling afraid), as opposed to physical homeostatic feelings (feeling hungry), is that the emotional ones are often the consequence and not the cause of decision making and behavior. Are you running because you are afraid or are you are afraid because you running? The latter is more possible as both the father of modern psychology, William James, remarked more than a century ago and neuroscience confirms today. This is even more so in survival and highly uncertain situations (escaping a fire). If evolution required from us to first consciously feel before we run from a fire, or a bear, we would all be dead by now! And this has significant implications for the ongoing discussions of free will. Nevertheless, a fascinating talk by a great scientist and thinker!
Beautiful. Thank you
The reason material will always remain just a perception is because there will always be an explanatory gap problem due to our subjective or inner reality not being able to be observed by us as if it were some material object that has physical properties, so it is inconceivable how such a reality can be observed by studying the brain.
It is the subjective self that is aware of the function of the senses being outlets that allow us to perceive the objective world. Our senses being material can only give us experience of material phenomena that has attributes of form, taste, smell, sound, and physical texture, but since consciousness being awareness is devoid of physical attributes our awareness which is the subjective self will always be inaccessible for our senses to perceive.
And since consciousness cannot observe consciousness there will always be an explanatory gap problem as well as the hard problem of consciousness that will always make consciousness and it's origins not observable by any material means. Since truth can be defined as " that which is realized to be true " materialism can never be a realized truth but rather a belief or perception.
Maybe consciousness is something relatively very basic and the rest, more advanced characteristics which we notice in the real world as the end result are simply parts of a multilayered system, like modules that extend its capability.
I was already of the opinion that animals probably have some degree of consciousness, like us, but I feel that what Mark says in this talk supports that view point. When you say modules that extend its capability, that made me think of colour vision. Some animals can see a wider spectrum of colours than we do, some less.
Vedanta is the very science of consciousness at both human and cosmic levels. It recognises consciousness as the ultimate reality and affirms its presence in all existence.
All this- whatever exists in this changing universe, is pervaded by consciousness"
--Isa Upanishad .5000-BCE
The ancient Vedic rishis in all their wisdom said as early as 8000 BC , that our universe is not woven from matter but consciousness . (They never patent there knowledge there own name ) There are connections between quantum mechanics & consciousness .
Consciousness is the intelligence, the organising principle behind the arising of form. The quantum field or pure consciousness is influenced by intention and desire.
All atoms in the entire universe are capable of mind reading and communicating with other atoms. There is a consciousness in every molecule of matter.
As per quantum physics things do not exist in its physical form, unless they are observed by a conscious observer.
In every experiment when an observer expected energy to behave as a particle, it did so. When he thought it would probably be wave-like, it was. And when observers believed it might start out as one form and end up as another, it did so.
This means ,nothing actually exists in its physical form until observed by someone, was adopted by the group as one of the concepts. You created them by your expectations and your thoughts of what should be. In every situation in your life, including the wealth or lack of it you choose to attract to you.
Biology is a quantum process. All the processes in the body including cell communications are triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appear at the quantum level.
On the subatomic level-mind is over matter. The brain and DNA is governed by the laws of quantum physics rather than the laws of biology or neuro physiology.
THE COSMOS IS THE PLAYGROUND OF MAYA.. FROM MICROCOSM TO MACROCOSM..
Bhagavad Gita is all about BEING IN THE MOMENT.
You cannot change your past, you cannot survive without water, you cannot change natures principle. The only solution is to accept things as they are.
Life is a combination or physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects. Without spiritual development , man is without love or positive emotions ( affection, care, respect, sympathy ) .
Karma is the result of your actions. If you do something good, you will get good tings in return and if you do bad things, you will get likewise in return.
Karma or the actions that you do in the present life is passed on to the next life. But fate is not passed on to the next life.
Dharma is when we are walking the path of our soul's purpose. When we are walking our path we are out of karma. We are no longer creating cause and effect. We are in flow with the universe, with our spirit. Our soul is line with the Divine.
'Manu-Smiriti'- 5000BC describes the code for leading a disciplined way of life.
Patience, Pardon, Suppression of will, Stay away from Theft, Purity, Control of desires, Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth, Controlling Anger. These 10 qualities are considered as main characteristics of the Dharma.
The whole of material creation is conscious. Our consciousness creates our reality. What our consciousness can conceive , it can also create.
Human beings are conscious. They can see themselves in the mirror and see colours, while an animal cannot.
To a Vedantic every part of this universe is dynamic, it is vibrating, it is listening and can respond according to ones KARMA, It can be by action and can be purely thought. The universe listens to our action as well as thought and gives in return what exactly we want either knowingly or unknowingly, weather it is bad or good.
Science is trying to understand the universe ‘out there’ and Vedanta addressed the universe ‘inside you’”
Schrödinger, in speaking of a universe in which particles are represented by wave functions, said, “The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.”
The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West. There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction… The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. - Erwin Schrödinger
" You do not have a soul ,
you are a soul and you have a body "
If counciousness is feelings then we should stop eating anything with a brain, maybe even anything alive.